I Love Airlines Week continues: American helps a passenger in need

Hmm…. while an added three hours in the layover is inconvenient, this was already a pretty long layover before the change. 9:45 – 6:15 is still eight and a half hours. What were the travelers planning on doing all night before the change? Most travelers would have booked a hotel room for the night for that kind of layover. (Since many airport terminals close at night, it is not as if there would be any choice in many destinations.)

SirWired

I am not as thrilled with AA and their “help”. I spent an hour on the phone day before yesterday, with the Platinum folks changing my husband’s flights. He is in Milan and needed to extend his trip a few days. Trouble is according to the agent AA only flys the Milan – DFW route on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and my husband wanted to come home on Thursday. Not only that he had paid to upgrade his original trip home with cash and miles to the tune of $323.00 plus miles.

Original AA rep we don’t fly that route on Thursday, we can have him travel on Friday and there are no upgradeable seats. Ok, if that is the best you can do the cost will be – $473.00 and some change. Can’t believe it so I decided to call back.

2nd rep, we only fly that route on MWF. Me – how about if we route Milan to LHR then LHR to DFW that is flown on a daily basis. Rep, let me ask the tariff folks. Yes, we can do that and it will be $423.00…but there are no upgrades available. Fine my husband wants to come home….but if you look at the web site it says there is the potential for 500 mile upgrades from New York to DFW can you wait list him for that…yes. I will assign seats. Of course nothing really worthwhile but when I went on line after I didn’t sit him smack in the middle of five there were better seats available then that.

Mileage spent is it out the window. Well potentially not. As we all know there is a fee to return the miles….so if we had decided to return the miles we have paid over $500.00 not to use miles. Instead, since he will probably be returning to Europe within the year they are in the bank to use. If if comes down to the we will lose them point then I will work at getting them back.

Now this is customer service for someone just shy of the million mile mark and over 100,000 this year….thanks AA for your understanding.

Originally full fare coach ticket. Husband didn’t spend the time to work on the upgrade. When he got to the airport – on the out bound – he found that he could upgrade miles/plus cash. Still cheaper then if he would have bought a business class ticket out right. When you travel to Europe at the last minute it isn’t always that cheap :) Found out a day ago that his business has been extended a week so needs to change the ticket. So it is basically a coach ticket to change (with the restricted upgrade that he purchased). Not so bad and can live with most of it but why did I come up with the routing when the people that get paid to figure it out couldn’t…that’s the biggest gripe. And I had to itterate several times to both employees that at the moment it didn’t matter whether it was a coach seat or not he didn’t want to stay an extra day and still get the coach seat (incurring another night in a hotel and paying 50.00 more then leaving on Thursday).

It certainly does seem that things work much better in Europe.
Last week my father and I arrived at the Istanbul airport at 3:30 am for a 5:50 am flight from Istanbul to Frankfurt and then Frankfurt to Portland, Oregon through Lufthansa. The ticket had been bought through Lufthansa directly.

The check-in agent wasn’t able to check him into the Frankfurt-Portland flight and asked us if we had time for her to call Germany to figure out the problem. She was told that my father had two reservations for flights, one for the same day and one for the next. We of course hadn’t heard anything about this, and had printed out the flight itinerary only the day before.

She finally discovered that the reason for the second reservations was because the original Portland flight had been cancelled. She then called the Lufthansa ticket agent at the airport and we were told that the Lufthansa options were long and would get him into Portland significantly later (we weren’t told though exactly how much later) than the original flight. Instead, she said that we could instead get booked on a KLM flight (Istanbul-Amsterdam-Portland) that left 30 minutes earlier and arrived in Portland only 20 minutes later than the original Lufthansa flight.

We agreed and were immediately booked onto the KLM flight without any hassle or problems. In fact, it was their own suggestion. I’ve never come across service this friendly or helpful…and all at 3:30 am. Both agents were friendly and helpful and solved the problem without us even having to ask. If only American air carriers were this helpful.